


Relinquish Forbearance

by MarginalMadness



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Dark, F/M, Future Fic, Physical Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:12:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2747270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarginalMadness/pseuds/MarginalMadness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To endure is not the same as to succeed and just because Cullen stopped taking Lyrium does not mean there wont be any possible future side effects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relinquish Forbearance

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Abuse, TW: Dark Themes, TW: Child Abuse, TW: Suicide, TW: Violence, (BTH I’ve never really written anything thats required TW before so I’m just trying to cover all my bases so I don’t accidentally trigger someone)

The first time it happens is after an intense night of love making in their new home.

He awakens with sweat drying on his skin and a naked elven woman he doesn’t recognize, draped over him him. He glances around the room, wooden walls, sparsely decorated, boxes and bags stacked in corners and then he sees it.

A mages staff.

He tenses, noticing the dagger on the bedside, no doubt used for blood magic by the maleficar that lured him here. He had no recollection of events that led up to this situation, hadn’t engaged in any activity that could have led to him being drugged or inebriated, so what else could cause such a thing except blood magic? His finger wrapped around the short, golden hilt and in a move that felt more difficult than it should have been, he flipped the woman on the bed, straddling her waist, holding her throat, pressing the dagger to her jugular.

Pale green eyes flew open, hands grasping at his wrist.

“Where am I?” He spat at her.

“Cullen?!” She chokes out.

“Where am I?” He says again, more forcefully, tightening the hold on her throat.

“Redcliffe.” She gasps, trying to adopt a calm tone. “You’re Cullen Stanton Rutherford, you grew up near Honnleath, you have two sisters and a brother...you know me.”

“Blood magic lets you read people’s minds, any blood mage could have learned such information! Why am I not in the Circle?” He hisses.

“Try to remember, After Uldred, you left the circle, you went to Kirkwall. Left the Templars, gave up lyrium.”

“LIES!” He roars and the dagger presses further into her delicate skin, making the smallest cut and the slightest bloom of deep red.

She cries out in pain, and suddenly the world shifts and it makes sense again but it doesn’t, colours are too bright and dim at the same time, noises are sharp yet muffled, he tilts sideways, the dagger slipping from his hand and the world goes dark.

When he finally wakes, he’s lucid and back to his old self, Kaesha’s sitting by the side of the bed, clothed now, but with a bright white dressing covering the wound on her neck. He wails and hides his face in his hands, curling in on himself, the guilt and shame eating at him. She moves to the bed, offering words of comfort but he can’t hear them, doesn’t want to hear them.

He stands and physically dragging her out of the room, pushing her into the hallway beyond, slamming the door and bolting it shut behind her, collapsing against it. Knees and forehead pressed to the hard unforgiving wood. It’s safer this way. Safer for her. Safer for his wife if he is locked away from her. What kind of husband does that?  _A broken one_ . A voice whispers in his ear, a voice he recognizes as his own and yet not, he tries his best to block it out.

He spends hours there, propped against the door, replaying the scene over and over, slowly tearing his own heart to shreds as he recognizes the fear in his wifes eyes as the knife bit into her skin, and the acceptance that if this were to be her end so be it. She would not fight back, not fight him. She could have used her magic but she didn’t. She would never hurt him, and didn’t that knowledge wound him most of all.

The entire time he sat by the door she was pressed to the other side. Crying, pleading to be let in, begging him not to shut her out, but what else could he do? He couldn’t protect her from this. Couldn’t protect her from himself. She didn’t blame him, her words came through the door, they’ll find a way to stop it happening again, a way to make him remember faster, she wont leave her staff in the room, it was a stupid thing of her to do and she should have known better. She was making excuses for him and as he tried to repeat them they tasted like bile on his tongue.

“Cullen, please don’t hurt yourself.” Her voice was small and broken and so opposed to everything she was it broke him from his anguish, and he could bare to her cause her to worry no longer, he unbolts the door and she pushes it open, scrambling into his lap, taking his pale, haunted face into her hands and bringing her forehead to his. Her face is tear stained and blotchy, and she’s bitten through her bottom lip with worry, but she’s in his arms, and as kisses, and promises of continued love pepper his face, he wraps his arms around her, and although he feels unworthy of them, he accepts both.

 

* * *

 

The second time it happened was the last.

 

The young, mage girl he found in the house, screams and cries, twisting every which way, trying to pull her arm free of his grip.

“Daddy you’re hurting me! DADDY LET GO!” Her small fingers claw at his hand, and delicate fists beat against his arm.

“I am not your father.” He says sternly to the little blonde as he pulls her along the road he thinks lead out of the woods. Large, pale, green eyes look up at him from behind golden ringlets in fear, and he goes to a knee to try a different tactic. “You are a mage,” he says as kindly as he can muster, “I’m taking you to the circle. If you come with me, without complaint your parents will not be punished for harboring an apostate.”

The girl, who couldn’t have been more than eight, launches herself at his neck, warapping her free arm around it. The hand holding his sword comes up to stroke her back in a oddly familiar fashion, that he assumes must be instinctual. “Daddy, I know I’m a mage.” She says, laying a hand on his cheek, “I don’t need to go to the circle, Mama’s teaching me, like the Keeper taught her.”

Rage boils through him. Maleficarum obviously run amok in these woods, breeding, and no doubt using blood magic to confuse those who wonder in unsuspectingly as he must have. They’ve even taken to corrupting these children to spread their heathen ways. It was an affront to the Maker, and he would not stand for it.

“I told you. I am not your father, child!” He grows standing abruptly, and the girls face crumples, tears spilling from her eyes again.

She grabs at the front of his shirt, begging desperately now. “Daddy no. Daddy please! Don’t take me away. I promise I’ll be good! I wont use magic ever again, I promise! Not even on accident! Daddy please don’t make me go away. Daddy I love you, pleasepleaseplease don’t take me away from you and Mama-”

“Lieutenant Commander Cullen!” A female voice calls sharply. The use of his rank makes him stop and turn, but he keeps his sword ready; he is not in uniform and he does not recognize the voice.

The mage steps out of the tree line a second later, staff raised and glowing, ready. He channels all his might and sends a silencing wave towards her, and the pain that rips through him feels like his body is on fire, his muscles spasm and he joints feel like they are going to explode, the pain of it sends him crashing to his knees. What had those blasted mages done to him? He pulls the girl in front of him, pressing the tip of his sword to her side, she cries out but he hardly notices, one cannot treat maleficar with mercy or fairness, and even though, he would never truly hurt the child, he hopes the threat is enough.

It is not.

The mage was calm and with a flick of her wrists vines shot out from amongst the trees, wrapping themselves around his wrists and pulling his arms wide, the sword falling uselessly away from the girl. Slowly the vines began to crawl around him, placing his hands behind his back as though he were a prisoner, wrapping him up, cocooning him, trapping him and he falls forward. His breathe becomes short and panicked. It is going to happen again. Mages are going to torture him once more, they are going to try and break him, he struggles against his binds but cannot move.

His vision blurs but he see the girl escape his hold and run to the woman, an elven woman, obviously her mother, and the both look at him in disgust with the same large, pale, green eyes. No not disgust. Fear. He’d tried to take her daughter- tried to take their daughter. Oh, Maker, what had he done. He’d dragged her from her home, told her he wasn’t her father. The first came out as a choking sound but was quickly followed by deep, wracking sobs, rocking his body, as the realization of all he had done hit him. His wails are more reminiscent of a dying animal than human, but he cares not. He buries his face in the dirt beneath him, tears mixing with the dust, mud marking his face, as his wife and daughter looked on at the monster he had become.

For what he has done here, for what he threatened to do, to what he would have done if his wife had not acted quickly enough…

There can be no forgiveness.

Slowly the vines recede and he stands. Without a word his wife takes their daughter’s hand, and nods to him as she turns to make her way back to their house on the outskirts of Redcliffe.

All this he remembers now. His wife, the only woman he had ever loved, the house he built, their daughter, with her mothers eyes and her fathers hair. Madeline Lavellan-Rutherford, was seven years, eight months and nineteen days old, she just came into her powers not a month ago, and she was the light of his life. He was there at her birth, has tucked her into bed every night since and braided her unruly mop of curls everyday before school. And then he put a sword to her side.

When he reaches the house it was quiet and cold, which is not something he ever associates with ‘home’ and that feeling settles in his stomache. The only sound is the hushed, whispered conversation coming from his daughters room.

“He didn’t mean it, da’len, your daddy loves you, you know that.”

Cullen rested against the wall, knowing the pain he had caused, the broken trust almost made him break down again. He was hearing things the mother of his child should never have to say, things that his daughter should never question, but thanks to him, she now did.

“But he said-”

“Your daddy is sick. Remember what I told you about the Templars? They made him sick, and sometimes he forgets, but he doesn’t mean it. He loves you, never doubt it.” Kaesha told her daughter in a soothing voice.

“But he hurt me.” The small voice broke into a sob at the confession, and Cullen let out a sob of his own, alerting them to his presence.

There was a beat of silence before Kaesha answers. “And I’m never going to let him hurt you again, okay? Do you want daddy to come tuck you in like always?” Madeline doesn’t answer verbally but, he isn’t called into the room and that feels like a knife in the gut, even if it is rightly deserved. Normally she would refuse to even get into bed if, Cullen wasn’t the one to place her there, and tell her a tale or sing her a lullaby to sleep. “Okay. You try and sleep, da’len. Everything will be different in the morning.”

She exits the room, closing the door firmly behind her, a clear sign that Cullen isn’t enter. It is all he could do to stand there, propped against the wall, hand over his mouth as though he could keep the sobs and the pain in by physically restricting it. She takes him by the hand and leads him to their bedroom, where she takes great care to strip him of his dirty clothes and carefully lie him down in bed before curling up next to him.

His hands and lips travel everywhere and she does not stop him, apologies whispered into her skin and she acknowledges them all. Desperate yet tender, a thousand promises that they both know he could never keep, even if he means every. single. word. with all of his being. They make love until the sun begins to rise and he holds her like he hadn’t held her since the days of Corypheus, when he was terrified he was going to lose her, and she holds him in a way, they both know is saying goodbye.

When he finally wakes, it’s to an empty bed, an empty house, and a letter on her pillow.

 

 

_I’m sorry._

_I can’t let that happen ever again,_

_Maddie has to come first._

_I love you, I always will._

_\- K_

 

He puts the letter down, and makes his way to the bookcase in the study, taking the small ornately carved box that sat, untouched, for the ten years they lived in the house, down from the top shelf. Kaesha wondered why he kept it; a reminder of what he was fighting, he told her. He opens it, taking out a small vial of lyrium, he had forgotten how brightly and unnaturally blue it glows.

He pulls out the stopper, remembering a conversation from long ago.

Raises the vial to his lips, she was wrong.

He tips back the contents with a practiced ease, trying to forget that the last image he would ever have of his daughter is of her looking at him with fear in her eyes.

 

There was some pain he could not endure.


End file.
